COVID-19 – Voices from Academia

The Covid-19 induced global crisis has now lasted for more than a year. We have seen different phases in how societies reacted to the challenge: the delayed acknowledgement of the scale of the threat, the following state of shock, the first national, then growingly transnational efforts to regain control over the pandemic development, the wave-like pattern of infections that resulted from repeated lock-downs and re-openings.

Throughout all these phases, scientific expertise has played a central role by informing the public and advising politics, by developing vaccines and therapeutics as well as simulating future developments. At the same time, we have to concede not yet having realized the full potential of what the scientific community at large can provide to societies in a crisis like this.

More than twelve months into the global pandemic, we collected voices from all over academia to mobilize this full potential. It thought it high time to leave behind the tunnel visions, short-term perspectives, and reactive attitudes of the initial state of shock and provide a collective, comprehensive, pro-active, and long-term perspective. Thus, we addressed fellow scientists worldwide with three overarching themes:

1. What are the most critical side effects and collateral damages of the pandemic and its management that have been unduly neglected?
2. What are the most important opportunities that arise from the certainly painful and costly disruptions the pandemic and its management has caused?
3. What can we do now to make other such crises less likely in the near and distant future?

The aggregated and comparative analysis of 81 responses provided by colleagues working in Brazil, China, India, Canada, the USA, Germany and Austria (among other countries), affiliated with the social sciences, the humanities and arts, the natural, engineering and life sciences, hints at cumulative negative effects of the pandemic and its management; it points at learning opportunities for responsible climate policies and digitalisation, and shows strong support of members of the academic community for paradigm changes in various sectors of society.